Long term success without carbon dosing

[ScubaSteve]

I kept an SPS tank thriving for a couple of years without any carbon dosing and only a ****ty skimmer. Water changes should be your go to method for water quality. Even now as I carbon dose and run GFO I do weekly 15-20% water changes.

[reeferfulton]

Originally Posted by ScubaSteve

I kept an SPS tank thriving for a couple of years without any carbon dosing and only a ****ty skimmer. Water changes should be your go to method for water quality. Even now as I carbon dose and run GFO I do weekly 15-20% water changes.

Ok well thats good to hear . I keep being told that i should start carbon dosing now while my nitrates and phosphates are still low . With the theorey of do it now or play catch up later .

What eventually caused you to start carbon dosing ? what changed .
And did your start with the carbon dosing and then discover that you still had phosphates and then started GFO ?

thanks

Guess maybe i jumped the gun on buying a reactor and pump and pellets ..I was just under the thought of start now or regret later

[reefermadness]

start the pellets....whats the down side. You can feed more and get more fish....

[i have crabs]

All this talk about water changes, bio pellets and cleaning your skimmer cup sound like fads im gonna skip, i feed heavy And my only problem is keeping enough calcium in the water cause eveything grows to fast

[Rice Reef]

Originally Posted by reefermadness

start the pellets....whats the down side. You can feed more and get more fish....

+1

Every system is going to be different and every hobbyist is going to look at it slightly different (base on the amt of money one wishes to spend on this hobby and amt of time to look after their tank etc...), however for every action there is going to be a reaction and it will be based entirely in what you are wanting to achieve. I dont think there is a right or wrong answer ( to dose or not to dose carbon)... determine what you want to keep in the tank, how many fish you want to keep, whether you plan to feed often or not and how much you plan to do water change. If you do start to dose do so slowly and gradually build it up. If you are at an undetectable level why not keep it undetectable rather than to wait until all hell breaks loose and then do something about it? What do you want to achieve...to maintain an undetectable nitrate level or something close to that or being willing to tolerate an amt of nitrate?

If you choose not to then the advice given by others are also very valid... Feed less, have less fish, more frequent water changes or tolerate brown corals.

[ScubaSteve]

Originally Posted by reeferfulton

Ok well thats good to hear . I keep being told that i should start carbon dosing now while my nitrates and phosphates are still low . With the theorey of do it now or play catch up later .

What eventually caused you to start carbon dosing ? what changed .
And did your start with the carbon dosing and then discover that you still had phosphates and then started GFO ?

thanks

Guess maybe i jumped the gun on buying a reactor and pump and pellets ..I was just under the thought of start now or regret later

More my point was that you can successfully keep a reef quite healthy with just the fundamentals of reefing.

I went to carbon dosing (I use VSV + MB7) because:

1) I am a scientist and am constantly experimenting. I was curious. After trying a whole bunch of different things I found VSV to work the best for me.

2) Carbon dosing keeps the water on the cleaner side and gives me a bit of leeway in case I need to skip a water change. I run a business and am doing a PhD. My schedule is erratic to say the least; this lets me skip WCs if needs be.

3) I feed stupid amounts of food to my tank (like 1.5 to 2 cubes of mysis in a 50 gallon per day, plus a few krill for the mystery wrasse). I have several hungry mouths that belong to high-octane fish that need to be fed several times per day. On top of this I have a TON of coral (basically I keep the tank for the coral) and they tend to do better with higher feedings. Dosing keep water quality at top notch.

I started VSV after building a new tank a year and a half ago. I started after the transfer to keep the cycle to a minimum.

I prefer VSV (or vodka or vinegar) over biopellets, unless you add a recycle loop to your pellet reactor to control how much water you are processing. The problem with pellet reactors, especially on tanks less that ~180 gallons, is that they are essentially running at full throttle all the time. Many tanks had crashes from pellets when they first came out because no one realized this; you are basically starving the corals to death. Sure the corals looked great before they died, but you know so do human super models... and I wouldn't peg them as the epitome of health. The way to counteract this problem is to feed more. To me this seems silly as it's like driving your car with the gas pedal pinned while trying to slow down with your break pedal; not exactly efficient. The liquid carbon dosing methods let you dial in exactly how much needs to be dosed based on your tank requirements. If I feel the corals are being starved a bit, I back off; if the nitrates are climbing, I bump it up a bit. Can't do that with a pellet reactor unless you add a recycle loop to the reactor.

It's easier to start VSV when you have some nitrates so that you can watch the nitrates come down and dial in your dosing amount. You can start from the get go but you need to start with a small dose amount and then increase slightly as nitrates go up.

I'd start GFO right from the get go.

Just my two cents...

[reeferfulton]

thanks for your input .

Do you really think i should run the GFO right now . I was under the impression that for the carbon dosing methods to work you need to have phosphate and nitrate available in addition to the carbon dose to feed the bacteria .
That being said I have also read that there is usually phosphates left over even after nitrates are undetectable . which is why people run the GFO in addition .

IT seems like most mixed tanks incorporate some sort of carbon dosing so i am
likely going to have to start
I think of all the carbon dosing methods I will most likely try the pellets . People are having success with them , so why not me lol .

I think i am going to keep a real close eye on nitrates and phosphates over the next month . And will start my pellets off if i start to see any sort of rise in my indications .

thanks

[slakker]

I've had 3 tanks (simultaneously) in the last 5 years and NEVER carbon dosed. In my 72G, I've had success in LPS and softies, but never long term success with SPS... similarly with the 30G and 14G... so I just started with the bio pellets with my new 90G (upgraded the 72G)...

I think you can have success without carbon dosing, but like any technology, it a means to an ends and different people use different technologies to achieve the ends...

Heck I know a guy that still keeps a tank with nothing but water changes... no dosing, not kalk wasser, no kalk reactor, etc.. And he does alight...

[Son Of Skyline]

My tank is a little over 4 years old and at about the 3 year mark I started dosing vinegar and tried pellets. My algae all disappeared, and my corals became pale. I had to clean my pumps and plumbing twice as often because of the bacterial slime buildup. I could tell that all the inhabitants of the tank were stressed to some level. I stopped after 6 months and now everything seems much happier. Better PE, more "normal" algae growth, coral colors deepened again (some more brown but much happier looking), no more slime clogging up my plumbing..etc. I won't do carbon dosing again. My tank never needed it.

[asylumdown]

I would start bio-pellets now, if you plan on them being a part of your over-all tank strategy. Many of the cases of biopellets causing crazy cyano blooms (mine included) involved older tanks that were 'higher nutrient' starting pellets midstream. On my old 90 gallon, which was by no means an ULNS, I had cyano so badly you couldn't see the sand or rock a week after starting pellets. On my current tank, which has had pellets from the beginning and evolved from the start with them as a part of the system, I've never had that problem.

Also, I have no data to back this up, only personal experience from a single case (and an anecdote does not a rule make) - but I have a hypothesis that if you end up with a problem algae outbreak and then add pellets to try and control it, you're not going to have nearly as much success than if you start the pellets or some other carbon dosing regimen early and prevent the problem from happening in the first place. My logic behind this is that pellets can only suck nitrates from the water that is flowing through the reactor, while an established bed of algae has the entire surface area of your display tank to pull nutrients from the water column, so once an algae problem happens, they're going to be a better competitor for what does become available in the water than your biopellet reactor. I've never tried whole tank carbon dosing, but it probably doesn't apply in that case, but either way it's better to never let that problem develop in the first place.

The people who've had success with SPS and no carbon dosing long term have something else in their tanks dealing with the nutrients. Unless you do very frequent, very large water changes, that's never going to be sufficient to keep nitrates and phosphates down long term with a medium bio-load, so for the people who only do that and still have sparkling clean, algae free tanks, they likely also have very good live rock that denitrifies efficiently. You can try to cherry pick the best rock, but since you will never know what's really going on inside of it, you really have to rely on luck in choosing the best pieces if that's how you plan on dealing with nitrates long term. Bio-pellets or carbon dosing simply gives you more control over the process.